mdangeard's blog

I recently received a message from somebody who had declared "email bankruptcy": basically his email inbox was getting so big, and he was falling so far behind, that he gave up on trying to manage the information overflow, and decided to open a new email account to start fresh. He was informing his friends that anything that had not been answered would not be, and whoever had important business to deal with could contact him at the new email address. He was not the first and I see more and more of this happening.

I discussed in a previous post presenting Xavier Comtesse work on the matter how New Territories are emerging as a result of the disconnection between the business layer and geographical limits as defined by nations or other governmental entities.

Related to this trend, it is interesting to see now more and more projects around the concept of virtual currencies.

eCairn recently published a very interesting analysis on what happens when you open a site and ask people to contribute ideas. They mention Dell Ideastorm and the Obama administration Citizen's Briefing Book from the Obama administration, and I have to agree with the conclusion: you have to know what to expect when opening up the doors to input with no filtering. And where and how you "listen" to your audience makes a difference:

Territories as defined by government have become disconnected from the ecosystems in which people and business live and work. New ways of communicating have created an additional layer on top of these territories and ecosystems, ultimately defining new territories in which we have to coexist.

Just downloaded the Firefox extension from Reframeit.
This is a great tool that allows you to comment on any page on the web, and see comments by others. It should make the experience of reading the news (for example, it apply to any content really) way more interesting.
I like that you can create group that are public or private to share your comments with people who care about one issue or another.
Another great step forward for us users...

Just like with the internet websites of web1.0, companies are slowly getting into social media and web2.0: many companies today have blogs, and try to establish a presence in the blogosphere through them, with the help of evangelists who monitor what is going on and mix with the crowd to spread messages. As a sign of this, Inc Magazine reports that "31% of the CEOs of their Inc500 companies maintain a blog or social network and for the most part they love them."

From what I see, there are 2 ways to look at Twitter:
- an instant messenger for exhibitionists
- a tool to add another layer of randomness into your life

Now who would want to use this? Are you an exhibitionist? some people are... Or are you so bored, stuck and so lazy to work on it that randomness seems to be a nice way out?
Or could there be something else?